IS Humour Conference

IV International Conference on Humour. Theories and History of Humour – Arts, Literatures, and Science. Codogno (Italy), 10-11 October 2014 Ivan Z. Sørensen Karen Blixen’s Humour – with reference to Kierkegaard and Pirandello - and Spinoza’s SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS Motto: ”L’umorismo invita a guardare l’oggi con gli occhi di domani” (Giovaninno Guareschi).1 Allow me to start with a biographical note about the Danish storyteller Karen Blixen. In 1931, after 17 years as a farmer or colonialist in Kenya, she returned to her childhood home, Rungstedlund, some 30 kilometers north of Copenhagen. Here she dedicated herself to writing stories. In 1934, when she was almost 50 years old, her Seven Gothic Tales was published in the USA – under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. Immediately a big success. A few months before she died, September 1962, she gave an interview to Belgian TV. She was asked to give young people some wise words concerning ‘ The art of living’ . Let us hear her answer: “Je répondrais: il faut avant tout avoir du courage. Sans un grand courage, pas moyen de vivre. Et s’ils me questionnaient encore, je leur dirais: il faut avoir le don d’aimer, et il faut avoir le sens de l’humour”2 It is worth noting that ‘sense of humour’ – in her terms – is something you can choose, decide, that is: it is not necessarily innate. This idea is also expressed in a letter from her stay in Africa to her brother Thomas, who at that time had some difficulties in his life: ”I think two things would help you just now: a sense of humour, and danger. And by the way, read Søren Kierkegaard…” 3 Please note how Kierkegaard is mentioned in connection with ‘sense of humour’ – and danger! Here we have my first cornerstone: Humour as a ‘view of life’/‘ vision du monde ’/ concessione della vita – or in German: Lebensanschauung . The Art of Fiction is the title of Eugene Walter’s interview with Blixen in Rome 1956. He asks her about the comic spirit in her tales. 1 “Isak Dinesen: Oh, I’m glad you mentioned that! I do often intend a comic sense, I love a joke, I love the humorous. The name “Isak” means “laughter”. I often think that what we most need now is a great humorist.” 4 And this is my second cornerstone: Humour as a ‘literary technique’ – with reference to Pirandello. But first: Lebensanschauung – ‘the art of living’ I prefer the German word because it is a concept typical of German philosophy in the first part of the 19 th century: Jean Paul, Hegel – and Kierkegaard. “We shall have a story now” – with the words of Robert Redford in Out of Africa . Here we will take Converse at Night in Copenhagen – from the 1957-collection Last Tales . A rainy night in 1767 the Danish king Christian VII – young, wild and loony – has been fighting with the police in the streets of Copenhagen, as he often did. He escapes and finds himself in the suggestive room of the whore Lise. In here the poet Johannes Ewald has already finished his business, as he says – and the king and the poet start their conversation. The king moans about the prudes, the virtuous ladies at court, and he concludes: “and in a bed they will talk!” The poet can only agree: “You have said it, Sire. In a bed they will talk, the furies out of hell! At the moment when up to, and above, the limit of our strength we have gifted them with our full being, our life and our eternity, then they will talk! (…) they insist on being told whether the adrienne they had on yesterday did become them, and whether there is life after death!” 5 A very important source for my pinning down Blixen’s humour is The great Humo ur, in the German version: Humor als Lebensgefühl. Das Grosse Humor , by the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding, who contributed considerably to developing Blixen’s Lebensanschauung . According to Høffding there is a small humour (jokes, puns, wise cracks etc.) connected to concrete situations and context; and there is a great humour (‘Lebensanschauung’ or ‘Lebensgefühl’), which is a disposition or attitude towards life as a whole: a ‘total emotion’, in Høffding’s terminology. 6 2 When ejaculation, as in Blixen’s tale, is combined with ‘full being’ and ‘eternity’, then this is small humor; it is comic (but not illogical!). Nevertheless, eternity, i.e. the question whether there is a life after death, is the pivotal point in the ‘invention’ of the great humor – as a view of life. Just as it was in the philosophical discussion all over Europe in the Romantic era, the period where most of Dinesen’s stories take place. I shall restrict myself to mentioning Jean Paul, who – besides Kierkegaard – is an important inspiration for Høffding. Jean Paul mirrors a common romantic ‘life-view’ of that time when he describes Dichtung as “dieser menschlichern Himmelfahrt, wo der Himmel selber zu uns herunterfahrt, nicht wir später in ihn hinauf. Es wohnt eine Kraft in uns, deren Allmacht uns ebensowohl Himmel als Höllen bauen kann, es ist die Phantasie.” 7 Imagination is in fact the core of Karen Blixen’s literary technique, her art of fiction . The ascension – die menschliche Himmelfahrt – is turned upside down: Heaven, eternity, and beatitude are present here and now – on earth. Thanks to Dichtung and Imagination. In the king’s words – in the suggestive room of the whore: ”Il y a dans ce monde un bonheur parfait.” 8 Here it is worth noting Blixen’s remark: “Well, I am audacious by nature, and I contain or hide my impudence, only because I am bien-elevée!” 9 Blixen was a master of intertext and context, subtext and irony, and a way of ‘hiding’ her impudence was to shift into French. Not least in the room of a whore. When Dinesen as a non-Christian deals with these things: earth and heaven, eternity and beatitude – and she often does – she cannot but make fun of Christianity, of doctrines of body and soul and atonement, to drag the most holy phenomena down to earth. 3 When, 1926 in Africa, she tried to assess her life and possibilities, she dedicated herself to her angel Lucifer, and she explains the symbolic expression thus: “The search for truth … a sense of humor which is afraid of nothing , but has the courage of its convictions to make fun of everything…” 10 Whereby she outlined the program for her future literary praxis, her art of fiction . In Babette’s Feast the French cook exalts her narrow- minded, Protestant guests inasmuch as she turns the dinner “into a kind of love affair of the noble and romantic category in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite or satiety.” What happens during this supper? “The rooms had been filled with a heavenly light … Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues… Time itself had merged into eternity … They had been given one hour of the millennium. … ‘Bless you, bless you, bless you,’ like an echo of the harmony of the spheres rang on all sides.” 11 A blessed joke, the narrator states. Of course! Because the ascension – die menschliche Himmelfahrt – of these ascetic Christians is due to the good wine! They are simply drunk. Even if her criticism of Christianity is seriously meant, you could say that her consequent use of Christian terminology and doctrines, mentality and view of life and death – is part of her subtext and irony. And furthermore: Blixen expounds the biblical texts and expressions in an immanent and non- metaphysical mode, for instance expressions like ‘the divine’, “God” and “destiny”. Religious terms indicate conditions in human life – not in heaven. In short: God is a metaphor for the great artist – or vice versa: “Thy will be done, William Shakespeare, as on the stage so also in the drawing room.” (Tempests)12 4 In her posthumous story Ehrengard she mobilized her biblical metaphorical vocabulary, putting God on the stage: "Madame," said Herr Cazotte, "The Lord God, that great Artist, at times paints his pictures in such a manner as to be best appreciated at a long distance. A hundred and fifty years hence your present predicament will have all the look of an idyll composed to delight its spectators. Your difficulty 13 at this moment is that you are a little too close to it.” Blixen’s way to express the great humor in her stories is a dialectic play between the characters’ involvement in and consciousness of their present predicaments and their capacity to step back and survey themselves and the lives to which they are committed. Without developing the illusion that they are able to escape from their specific position, they can view it sub specie aeternitatis —and this view is at the same time sobering and comical. (To quote the philosopher Thomas Nagel) Spinoza , the 17 th century philosopher, is, as we remember, the author of the expression sub specie aeternitatis . Both Høffding 14 and Blixen (and Kierkegaard) often refer to Spinoza; sub specie aeternitatis is, so to say, Blixen’s humorous position and viewpoint. Which includes, as we shall see, a certain sadness or touch of melancholy. One of Karen Blixen’s Winter’s Tales (1942) is called The Heroine – the Danish version, however, Heloïse . The name is significant: Our female protagonist is a nude dancer and she suggests that she could have named herself Spinoza. Quite a peculiar stage name for a nude dancer! She mentions Spinoza at the end of the story in a discussion about time – and about women in time: “It is we who feel it, the women,” she says.

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